A month on the road: My indie developer road trip

“What the hell does this have to do with video games,” I asked myself. I was staring up at Provo Canyon in the middle of Utah, jaw dropped at the scale of it all. There was no cellphone reception, no technology and certainly no video game in sight. Just nature and the sound of falling water. I’d never felt so far from games in my life. The answer was curiosity. I was out here talking to a game developer because I wanted to know what it was like to develop independent games in different places. How one person in a small town of 1,300 compares and contrasts to a nine-person team in a city of 8.5 million. How their surroundings influence their work. So I did just that. Along with my friend and photographer, Levi Ryman, I spent a month between February and March of this year in my Ford Escape traveling 9,000 miles across the United States and back, visiting families, communities and developers in an effort to create a scrapbook of sorts, full of stories and profiles showing what it’s like for developers across the United States to create games. What I learned is that, just as no two people are the same, no two games are made the same way. Everyone we visited had a different story about how their location and the people around them has influenced the way they work and the games they put out. Brandon Goins: Alone for now Brandon Goins walks through… [Read full story]